Eric Burlison asks CIA and FBI about Brazil's Varginha UFO case

Thirty years after reports of a strange creature in the southern Brazilian city of Varginha, Rep. Eric Burlison has put the case back in front of two U.S. agencies. His office says the congressman wants the CIA and FBI to account for records connected to the January 1996 episode: flight activity, liaison reporting, possible transfers of material and any later U.S. handling of the matter.

The public paperwork is new. Burlison's FBI letter is dated May 1, 2026; his CIA letter is dated July 7, and his office announced both on July 8. Neither letter says that a UFO crashed in Brazil, that non-human beings were recovered, or that either agency has such evidence. The request is narrower and more consequential than that: find out whether relevant U.S. records exist, preserve them, and tell Congress what can be released.

That distinction matters because Varginha is not one clean event. It is a set of reports, a long-running local story, competing investigations and later claims that became known internationally as Brazil's Roswell. The memorable version has creatures, military trucks, a hospital and a U.S. airlift. The official Brazilian inquiry reached a much less dramatic conclusion. Burlison's letters are about the gap between those two things.

What Burlison has asked for

The FBI letter asks the bureau to preserve records, search its systems and brief Congress on any U.S. government, contractor, aircraft or liaison connection to the January 1996 events around Varginha and Campinas. It asks specifically about files, flight-related records, chain-of-custody material, laboratory notes and communications that could show whether any federal interest existed.

The CIA letter asks for a fresh review of the material sought in a previous private FOIA request, F-2023-00442. That request concerned U.S. government flights, material transfers and coordination with Brazilian authorities between January 14 and 28, 1996, including activity near Campinas in São Paulo state.

On January 10, 2025, the CIA neither confirmed nor denied that responsive records existed. That is a Glomar response, a standard FOIA posture used when even acknowledging the existence or absence of records is said to reveal protected information. It is not confirmation that the records exist, and it is not confirmation of any Varginha claim. Burlison argues that Congress can ask for a fuller accounting than a private requester can obtain through FOIA.

Both letters request an estimated schedule within 10 business days and seek production or a briefing within 30 days. As of July 16, no CIA or FBI response, briefing or document release has been made public.

What happened in Varginha in 1996?

Varginha is a coffee-region city in Minas Gerais, roughly 300 kilometres north of São Paulo. In January 1996, the city became the centre of a national media story after reports of unusual lights, military activity and a possible creature sighting.

The central eyewitness account came on January 20. Three young women said they saw a crouching, brownish figure near a vacant lot. Their description and their fear became the human centre of the case. In the days and years that followed, the story grew: researchers and witnesses connected the sighting to reports of a damaged craft, military collection operations, a hospital encounter, animal deaths and the later death of a military police officer.

Those later elements are the part that made Varginha famous. They are also the part that is hardest to separate from retelling. No publicly inspectable wreckage, biological sample, photograph of a captured being or official U.S. file establishes the extraterrestrial version.

The Brazilian Army opened a military-police inquiry into allegations that soldiers and military vehicles were involved. Material from that inquiry was made digitally available by Brazil's Superior Military Court in January 2026. Reporting on the released material says the investigation was closed in 1997 after finding no evidence of a military operation to capture an extraterrestrial being. Its account treated the episode as a chain of misunderstanding and rumor rather than a confirmed recovery.

That does not erase the original witnesses' account of seeing something alarming in the lot. It does mean the official inquiry did not substantiate the larger capture-and-transfer story. Varginha remains culturally alive in the city, which has memorials and tourism built around the case, while the evidence for its most dramatic claims has never become a public, testable record.

Why Campinas appears in the letters

Varginha and Campinas are different places, more than 200 kilometres apart. Campinas appears because the underlying FOIA request framed a possible U.S. flight and material-transfer trail through São Paulo state during the relevant dates. Burlison's letters do not say such a flight occurred. They ask the agencies to determine whether records about one do exist.

That is the actual news hook. The letters turn a decades-old claim into a defined records question: were there flights, liaison contacts, contractor files or transfers connected to the dates and locations named in the request? A release could add context. It would not, by itself, settle every claim that accumulated around Varginha.

A records story, not a recovered-body announcement

The title layer has already started to race ahead of the documents. Burlison's own press release says the letters do not ask the CIA or FBI to validate a particular public claim. The FBI letter says the same thing more directly: it does not assume an allegation is true or prejudge a federal violation.

Still, the request has value as an oversight test. The CIA's 2025 response left the historical record in a sealed box: neither confirmed nor denied. The new letters ask the agencies to search more broadly, preserve whatever they have and explain any legal basis for keeping it closed.

The next observable development is simple. A public agency response could say that no relevant records were found, describe records without releasing them, produce a redacted packet or move the matter into a classified briefing. Until one of those things happens, Varginha remains a specific Brazilian witness story with a large mythology around it — and a new congressional attempt to find out whether a U.S. paper trail sits behind any part of it.